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meandering: in thought on foot

emailed rebecca solnit to organize mfa student outing — snowshoeing walk/hike outside of town in medicine bow national forest. when is a walk more than a walk? when does it become a hike? when is a hike not just a walk in shoes that say, “I am not walking, I am hiking.”

from a 2009 interview with The Believer…REBECCA SOLNIT: In Wanderlust, I wrote, “This history of walking is an amateur history, just as walking is an amateur act. To use a walking metaphor, it trespasses through everybody else’s field—through anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies—and doesn’t stop in any of them on its long route. For if a field of expertise can be imagined as a real field—a nice rectangular confine carefully tilled and yielding a specific crop—then the subject of walking resembles walking itself in its lack of confines.”

faculty member andy fitch wrote a book about walking (ten walks/two talks). it’s very likely that he and rebecca have crossed paths at various mfa functions around town in the last couple of weeks. did they discuss walking?

also from Solnit’s interview in The Believer…
“I STILL THINK THE REVOLUTION IS TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR POETRY, MEANDERING, FOR THE FRAIL AND VULNERABLE, THE RARE AND OBSCURE, THE IMPRACTICAL AND LOCAL AND SMALL.”